Showing posts with label standards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label standards. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
EU Selects DVB-H As Preferred Mobile TV Standard
The European Commission has selected the DVB-H standard as the preferred technology for mobile broadcast TV transmissions in Europe. The commission will promote the standard in all 27 member states, in an attempt to establish a single market for Mobile TV. Member states will not be required, however, to ban other standards from their market.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
New US Mobile TV Standard Under Development
EETimes has reported that the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), the US standards group responsible for digital TV, is developing a new standard for mobile TV called ATSC-M/H (ATSC-Mobile/Handheld). The standard will be targeted at the delivery of TV services to mobile and handheld devices, and is designed to be backward-compatible with the existing ATSC digital terrestrial TV standard. ATSC is currently used in the US to provide High-Definition TV broadcasts to TVs in the home.
The ATSC-M/H standard is actually the third standard being proposed for extending the existing ATSC broadcasts in the US market for mobile reception. The two other standards are A-VSB promoted by Samsung and Rohde & Schwarz, and MPH proposed by LG and Harris.
The ATSC-M/H standard is actually the third standard being proposed for extending the existing ATSC broadcasts in the US market for mobile reception. The two other standards are A-VSB promoted by Samsung and Rohde & Schwarz, and MPH proposed by LG and Harris.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
CES Mobile TV Highlights - Part 1
Yes, it's that time of year again, when 140,000 people gather in Las Vegas to see the latest consumer electronic products and services. The major announcement of the first day was the official launch of the MediaFLO Mobile TV service by Verizon in the USA. The printed edition of USA Today which I got at the airport on my way to CES featured this item on the front page. The service will go live at the end of March, with CBS, NBC, Fox, MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon. Verizon will offer phones from Samsung and LG to support the service.
I saw the LG 9400 MediaFLO phone at LG's booth today, and TV reception quality is very good. You can see pictures of the phone at gearlog. LG also had a DVB-H phone at their booth, but it wasn't receiving any TV signals...
Modeo, which plans to launch a competing mobile TV service in the USA using DVB-H technology, announced its "commercial quality mobile TV beta service", which will start in the first quarter of 2007 in New York. Modeo's service will feature TV content from FOX and The Discovery Channel, and radio content from Music Choice. The choice of handsets, however, will be limited to a single handset designed by HTC.
As if we didn't have enough mobile broadcast TV standards, Samsung announced its own mobile TV technology which is being trialed this week at CES. The technology, called Advanced-VSB (or A-VSB for short), is an enhancement of the existing VSB digital television standard used by ATSC, and enables broadcasters to transmit a mobile digital TV signal on the same frequency as they use for standard television broadcasting. And another emerging bearer for mobile TV is WiMax: MobiTV, NDS and RunCom are demonstrating mobile TV over WiMax at the show.
More on Mobile TV at CES tomorrow...
I saw the LG 9400 MediaFLO phone at LG's booth today, and TV reception quality is very good. You can see pictures of the phone at gearlog. LG also had a DVB-H phone at their booth, but it wasn't receiving any TV signals...
Modeo, which plans to launch a competing mobile TV service in the USA using DVB-H technology, announced its "commercial quality mobile TV beta service", which will start in the first quarter of 2007 in New York. Modeo's service will feature TV content from FOX and The Discovery Channel, and radio content from Music Choice. The choice of handsets, however, will be limited to a single handset designed by HTC.
As if we didn't have enough mobile broadcast TV standards, Samsung announced its own mobile TV technology which is being trialed this week at CES. The technology, called Advanced-VSB (or A-VSB for short), is an enhancement of the existing VSB digital television standard used by ATSC, and enables broadcasters to transmit a mobile digital TV signal on the same frequency as they use for standard television broadcasting. And another emerging bearer for mobile TV is WiMax: MobiTV, NDS and RunCom are demonstrating mobile TV over WiMax at the show.
More on Mobile TV at CES tomorrow...
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Mobile TV Interoperability Problems
A very good article published yesterday by the EE Times discusses the current issues which are holding back global deployments of mobile TV, in particular those based on the DVB-H standard. Fragmentation in the media codecs, electronic service guide and service protection mechanisms are the main problems, causing the industry to speed up the creation of interoperability guidelines and certification mechanisms.
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Highlights of the IMA Mobile TV Conference
The Israeli Mobile Association (IMA) held a conference yesterday dedicated to the topic of Mobile TV technologies and services. The conference featured an impressive array of speakers from technology companies and mobile operators in Israel and abroad, who provided useful insights into the current mobile TV market. Below are some highlights from the conference.
Martin Richartz, Senior Technology Manager at Vodafone Group R&D, described the "mobile broadcast TV showdown" which will take place in Germany during the FIFA world cup next month. The games will be broadcast using a DVB-H network, operated by a consortium of all 4 German MNOs, and using a T-DMB network, operated by German start-up MFD. Mr Richartz urged the industry to converge on a bearer-agnostic IP service layer, which will ride on top of MBMS, DVB-H and eDAB, and enable service providers and content creators to roll out global services.
Guy Bauman, VP Business Development at Pelephone, gave an operator's view on mobile TV services. He described the Pelephone Zoom TV portal, which mixes video download, on-demand streaming and 21 live TV channels. Pelphone has found that prime time distribution in cellular TV is similar to regular TV, and that most users prefer music (31%), entertainment (29%), sports (11%) and news (10%).
Raimo Malila of Nokia Multimedia discussed the current fragmentation within the DVB-H standard between the DVB-CBMS and the OMA BCAST working group, especially on the issues of Electronic Service Guide (ESG) and content protection (conditional access and DRM).
Mr. Malila also described the possible business models for mobile broadcast TV, which are likely to be lead either by the broadcasters or the mobile operators. At the end of his speech, Mr. Malila presented a business case study for the roll out of a DVB-H network in Israel, claiming that the build-out cost to cover 95% of the population with in-door reception within 3 years would be 12.5M Euros, and the annual operating cost would be about 2-3M Euros per year.
Menno Bangma, Multimedia Services Consultant at TNO, described interative mobile services as a way to "push the portal" to the end-user, since they enable cross selling of content while watching TV, and create attractive opportunities for advertisers, such as impulse response, user feedback and user profile.
The conference concluded with an interesting panel session which gave some insights into the current challenges and roadmap for mobile TV services. The panel mentioned the following main constraints for the roll out of mobile TV services:
* Regulation and frequency aspects
* Standards fragmentation
* Echosystem (business model)
* Cheap terminals and multi-standard terminals (although there is a trade off between the two)
When asked about the best case scenario for mobile TV adoption, most panel participants replied that initial commercial services will be available within 18 months, and mass-market adoption is expected around 2008-2009.
Martin Richartz, Senior Technology Manager at Vodafone Group R&D, described the "mobile broadcast TV showdown" which will take place in Germany during the FIFA world cup next month. The games will be broadcast using a DVB-H network, operated by a consortium of all 4 German MNOs, and using a T-DMB network, operated by German start-up MFD. Mr Richartz urged the industry to converge on a bearer-agnostic IP service layer, which will ride on top of MBMS, DVB-H and eDAB, and enable service providers and content creators to roll out global services.
Guy Bauman, VP Business Development at Pelephone, gave an operator's view on mobile TV services. He described the Pelephone Zoom TV portal, which mixes video download, on-demand streaming and 21 live TV channels. Pelphone has found that prime time distribution in cellular TV is similar to regular TV, and that most users prefer music (31%), entertainment (29%), sports (11%) and news (10%).
Raimo Malila of Nokia Multimedia discussed the current fragmentation within the DVB-H standard between the DVB-CBMS and the OMA BCAST working group, especially on the issues of Electronic Service Guide (ESG) and content protection (conditional access and DRM).
Mr. Malila also described the possible business models for mobile broadcast TV, which are likely to be lead either by the broadcasters or the mobile operators. At the end of his speech, Mr. Malila presented a business case study for the roll out of a DVB-H network in Israel, claiming that the build-out cost to cover 95% of the population with in-door reception within 3 years would be 12.5M Euros, and the annual operating cost would be about 2-3M Euros per year.
Menno Bangma, Multimedia Services Consultant at TNO, described interative mobile services as a way to "push the portal" to the end-user, since they enable cross selling of content while watching TV, and create attractive opportunities for advertisers, such as impulse response, user feedback and user profile.
The conference concluded with an interesting panel session which gave some insights into the current challenges and roadmap for mobile TV services. The panel mentioned the following main constraints for the roll out of mobile TV services:
* Regulation and frequency aspects
* Standards fragmentation
* Echosystem (business model)
* Cheap terminals and multi-standard terminals (although there is a trade off between the two)
When asked about the best case scenario for mobile TV adoption, most panel participants replied that initial commercial services will be available within 18 months, and mass-market adoption is expected around 2008-2009.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
